The present invention relates to apparatus involved in making half-tone photographic exposures which are used to reproduce continuous tone original copy by printing.
It is desirable to eliminate operator intervention, and thus automate, the supplemental flashing and/or bumping steps involving exposing the photosensitive sheet to non-image light. Such procedures are well known to those skilled in the art and are explained in columns 1 and 2 of U.S. Pat. No. 4,275,961 to Fontana, incorporated by reference herein. The steps of flashing a plain non-image bearing card positioned over the original copy on the copy board, or shining a light through the camera lens, previously performed manually, are eliminated, to more completely automate the operation of the graphic camera. In accordance with such automation, a computation device, not part of the present invention, is employed to actuate a flash lamp for a precise interval as a function of various parameters which are fed to the computation device.